Movie Review – Angel

Angel (1937)
Written by Samson Raphaelson and Frederick Lonsdale
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Alfred Hitchcock was one of the directors who acknowledged Ernst Lubitsch’s influence on them. These filmmakers made very different types of movies, but sophistication was a common thread. They shied away from exploitation and tried to make pictures that challenged the audience’s intellect – one doing it comedically and the other through suspense. I think Angel is the most Hitchcockian Lubitsch film I’ve seen. While watching it, I was reminded of Vertigo. At the heart of this movie is a woman pretending to be someone else while keeping her private life hidden away. There is a man who pursues her out of curiosity. It’s not exactly like that classic Hitchcock film, but shares some structural threads.

Maria (Marlene Dietrich) is the wife of Sir Freidrich Barker (Herbert Marshall), a British diplomat often away from home due to his work. While he is away in Geneva, she decides to take a trip to Paris. Maria led a very different life before she became a diplomat’s wife and a Lady through marriage. She wants advice from an old friend, the Russian Grand Duchess Anna Dmitrievna. You see, Maria was a sex worker in her younger days, and the Duchess was the madame who ran the brothel. Anthony (Melvyn Douglas) and his mistakes Maria for the hostess are visiting the Duchess on the same day. She ends up having a fling with Anthony while remaining anonymous. He nicknames her “Angel.” After returning home, Maria believes that the situation is over, but finds her tryst has followed her to London, and it turns out Anthony and Sir Barker served in World War I together.

One thing I really loved about this film was how non-judgemental it is about Maria’s sex work. She did something to survive, and the picture never tries to frame her as worth any less for it. She’s kept it a secret from her husband because she worries about him leaving her, and that’s the core arc for these characters. He’s inevitably going to find out. Will his love for his wife override his fear about social status in a society that is highly focused on propriety? Anthony doesn’t care at all that Maria was a sex worker; he is entranced by her personality. Again, as in all Lubitsch movies, no one is ever a villain. He sees the world for what it is, people stumbling about trying to live & interacting with each other. It’s rare that anyone intentionally wants to do harm, but it happens because of carelessness or selfishness.

The film’s title is the central theme of the picture. In Gerald Mast’s The Comic Mind, he says, “Lubitsch constructs a film about one man who is willing to admit that a whore can be an angel and a second who must deal with the fact that his apparently angelic wife is a former whore.” So often in our transactional society, we attempt to reduce people to a label or two and derive their “value” from that. Through this film, we are asked to assess people as the totality of their lives, to understand that many people take on work that others might not approve of but help that person stay alive and keep a roof over their head. Apparently, in the Hays Code era of America, where the Great Depression brought out a puritanical strain in the public, this was not an acceptable message for a movie, and Angel was a box office flop. How foolish the people were.

Lubitsch is directly challenging the black-and-white morals of his time. He’s made a film with a protagonist the Hays Code says must be shown as objectionable. The script helps him hide the details that would have gotten the film otherwise censored into incoherence. His sophistication as a filmmaker makes it clear who she is and what she did without the need to spell it all out. Marlene Dietrich gave Maria such complexity and challenged what I thought she was. I’d only seen her as a film icon, with a sultry glance and an arched brow. This was my first time seeing her act, and she was outstanding. Lubitsch sought out actors, especially women, who gave more complex performances than many of their peers. 

The film is also commenting on the incoherence of relegating women to the same domesticity. Maria is expected to sit at home dutifully waiting for Sir Barker to return from his trips. But that’s simply not who she is, and we can infer through conversations that she wasn’t who she was when he met her. Barker was not attracted to Maria because she was a quiet domestic, but because of her sense of life, she exuded how she treasured and reveled in every moment. Maria is not an ornament, yet she passionately loves her husband. This is not the route you might expect the film to take, but again, Lubitsch is not simply content to entertain us; he also wants us to think about our own lives, especially for men, to think about how they limit the women they claim to love.

If this was simply a movie about a woman falling out of love with her husband and seeking comfort with another man, it would be another formulaic melodrama. Adding this layer of complexity that Maria has no interest in leaving Barker takes the film from being run of the mill to something greater. Yet, Anthony genuinely worships Maria; she is his angel. The film doesn’t toss his feelings to the side, either. The love triangle that emerges is complicated, messy, and melancholy. There’s no way someone doesn’t get hurt here, but what can be done? Even when the film concludes, we find ourselves happy that love has been found but still hurting for the person left alone. 

Dietrich was labeled “box office poison” after Angel’s financial failure. Paramount bought out the remainder of Dietrich’s contract, so they were not obligated to cast her in any more films. This followed a trip she had made to London, where the Nazi Party had approached the actress. She was German by birth, and they offered her lucrative contracts if she were to return and serve as a propaganda spokesperson for the regime. Dietrich refused and applied for U.S. citizenship instead, only to have her film career begin its descent. 

Throughout World War II, Dietrich, along with other Germans living in the States like filmmaker Billy Wilder, created a fund to help Jews and political dissidents escape Germany. She would never return to the glory of her film career in the 1920s and 30s, but she still appeared occasionally in pictures she was passionate about. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Dietrich put her energy into performing as a cabaret artist and would sell out large theaters throughout the U.S. Paramount were fools, and this is a very underrated Lubitsch film I hope critics revisit again someday.